Netflix popularity exceeds BitTorrent

Though some silly folks would tell you piracy is rampant online, research on the North American sector from Web analytics firm Sandvine shows P2P usage has been declining in recent years, dropping to 13.2 percent of all bandwidth, while video and music streaming account for a whopping 45.7 percent. Suprisingly enough, this comes in ahead of web browsing at 24.3 percent (presumably this refers to browsing that doesn't involve streaming). Basically, people really love to stream.

This is all great news for companies like Netflix who are surely raking in the dough, accounting for 20.6 percent of all "peak period bytes downloaded on fixed access networks in North America." And having launched recently in Canada, it has accounted for 95 percent of all traffic at its peak, and that's been with a limited selection (quite a few more titles have been added the past few weeks, though). You may have wondered why the service was experiencing brief outages recently -- yeah, we're pretty sure that's why.

This actually puts Netflix ahead of BitTorrent services, which goes to show the solution to piracy is to compete with it -- any sensible person will tell you the experience on Netflix is just easier and better than pirating.

This actually puts Netflix ahead of BitTorrent services, which goes to show the solution to piracy is to compete with it -- any sensible person will tell you the experience on Netflix is just easier and better than pirating.

It is easier and faster to stream over netflix than it is to download over torrent. At least with netflix, you can quickly find the movie and start playing it immediately. With torrent, you have to wait for the whole thing to download before you can play.

Well, it's not like you're not allowed to do that or anything. They prevent you from abusing it by limiting you to six different devices, and only so many devices can be on it at the same time, depending on your subscription type.

It would be the same if I were to rent a disc from them and invite friends over to watch it with me.

[link name=fury]/members/fury/" class="mention[/link], I see, didn't know about the limit -- that's good. I guess they're comfortable with that then.

It's not the same as renting a disc, though...this is infinitely more easy to share, especially so often. It's not like you'd rent thousands of discs all the time and let your friends over to watch whatever they wanted whenever.